A sermon
Preached Sunday, May 4, 2025
at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Saratoga Springs
Audio available here

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, composited from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 3, 2003 through January 16, 2004. The patch of sky in which the galaxies reside was chosen because it had a low density of bright stars in the near-field.

Would you join me in a moment of prayer?

Spirit of awe and wonder, Creator of imagination and play, Conspirator of compassion and justice, thank you for your presence with us this morning. Stay with us here today. Guide my words and the reflections of all our hearts. May it be so.

You are here. You are here, in this place (or in your place, virtually with us now or watching afterwards). It’s a comfortable space; a space you can really wrap your head around. You can see and touch and hear and smell nearly everything in this space. I’d guess it’s about 600, 700 square feet? Give or take.* You folks at home probably know your square footage by heart.

Outside of this space, there’s a city. If you’re on Zoom, you have my permission to click away and google the size of your local municipality or county, but outside of this space is the place we know as Saratoga Springs. Saratoga Springs is officially 28.87 square miles in size. More than we can see and touch and feel if we stay still, but many if not all of us could travel the city from end to end, given the right assistance. I’m sure folks at home could experience the same.

Saratoga Springs is part of Saratoga County, which is officially 844 square miles in size. A short drive from end to end, so we move on to the land we know as New York State, which is 54,000 square miles. We’re now looking at road trip distances. New York State is, of course, part of the land we know as the United States, and the United States is nearly 4 million square miles. Planes and trains are now part of our travel considerations. And the United States is part of the land mass we know as North America, which is 9.5 million square miles. The Earth itself is 196 million, 936 thousand, 994 square miles, an impossible surface area to comprehend.

We have mostly considered the horizontal space around us in this brief tour of our place in the universe, but now it’s time to consider moving up. Our atmosphere is essential to us, it’s where the vast majority of our living happens, but compared to the size of our planet, our atmosphere is thinner than the skin of an apple is to the apple. You have to go 75 miles up to get into the layer of the atmosphere where the auroras happen. If you go about 266 miles up, you reach the orbit of the International Space Station. Our nearest celestial body, our Moon, is a comfortable quarter of a million miles away on average, or three days in an Apollo spacecraft. And then, it is miles and miles of empty space before you might arrive at Venus, 23 million miles away at its closest approach, or Mars, 39 million miles at its closest, in the other direction.

If we had more time, we could go through each of our eight planets in the solar system (nine if you’re feeling feisty), but we need to travel on. At this scale, it’s best to start measuring distance by the time it takes light to travel it, rather than miles. Light, the fastest thing in the universe, travels at 186 thousand, 282 miles per second. The Sun is 93 million miles from Earth, which makes it about 8 light minutes away. It takes light, traveling at 186 thousand, 282 miles per second, eight minutes to go from the Sun to us, meaning that if the Sun were to disappear this instant, it would take us 8 minutes to get the news.

Now, our entire solar system, depending on how you define it, is about one light year, side to side. A light year is 5.88 trillion miles. Now, it took New Horizons, our first mission to Pluto, nine years to arrive at Pluto, traveling at 36,000 miles per hour, and that’s just a small portion all the space in our solar system. Once we’re past Pluto, we need to travel outside the Sun’s area of gravitation influence and magnetosphere, the extent of its magnetic field. Now we’re in interstellar space, a vast emptiness larger than the space between the planets, and interplanetary space was already unfathomably large to begin with. It is 4.25 light years to the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri.

Proxima Centauri and our Sun are part of an arm of a spiral galaxy we call the Milky Way. Now, we’re inside it, so we can’t know for sure its entire, exact structure. Parts of the galaxy are blocked from our sight by big lanes of dust and gas that will one day form into stars, but for the most part, we’re actually miraculously lucky to be where we are. Our local neighborhood of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way is what’s called the Local Bubble. It’s an area of space about 500 light years in diameter that is relatively free of interstellar dust and gas. This means that we can see. We can look out at distant stars like Betelgeuse or Antares or Deneb. We can see even beyond our galaxy to other galaxies. We can see pulsars and quasars and galactic clusters, even project the Large Scale Structure that galaxies form, a spiderweb tens of billions of lightyears in size shaped by what, we don’t know. The radiation from the earliest eons of the Universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation is visible to us, using the right equipment, all because we live in a place on a planet around a star that happens to be in a surprisingly empty bubble of space.

We cannot touch any of this. We cannot hold stars in our hands or wrap galaxies up in our arms. And yet we, these tiny bodies of carbon and calcium, water and iron, blood and bone, have found a way to let the star-forged elements of the universe within us look back at where they came from. How astounding! How amazing. How wonderful. How awesome.

Now, I hope my trick has worked. I hope for a moment in there you truly felt some sense of awe and wonder. See, what I discovered while doing graduate work in science and religion, is that most of us are wired for awe.** Even if we don’t experience it when looking at the night sky or imagining our place in the universe, we’ve likely felt it at another time: maybe the birth of a child, or watching a storm roll in across the ocean, standing at a glacier or meeting a world leader or a celebrity (whatever celebrity means to you), being starstruck. We can be awestruck by an abundance of occurrences in our daily lives, and we don’t need comfort or abundance to experience it. When hope is found amidst the rubble, when hearts and lives connect in the struggle, wonder can interlace itself in our experience, sparking reflection, encouragement, and desire, a moment where deep calls unto deep and our spirits are stirred. Our imaginations are unleashed, and we begin to dream beautiful dreams of the wonders that can be.

But awe and wonder can be manufactured as well. In my academic work, I explored what I have come to think of as the “Billions and Billions” effect, after Carl Sagan’s famous phrase. Many of us respond to the concept of largeness with some level of awe. In fact, many of us might define our spiritual search as a journey to connect to something bigger than ourselves, whether it be the divine or a deeper connection with humanity and the interconnected ecosystem that is life all across our planet. By using words like thousands, millions, or billions, even by using lightyears, a speaker can activate the “Billions and Billions” effect, can press that “awe button” in our brains that makes us want to lean in and know more. (You can also do this by talking about the very small and precise, as Feynman does, but I’m trained as an astronomer, so big is what you get with me.)

And wonder, I would argue, is a good emotion! Quantitative research on awe and wonder is in its infancy, but the studies they have done show that experiencing awe not only leads to curiosity, it also leads more pro-social behavior. In one study, participants who had just been to see a dinosaur skeleton in a museum were more likely to help a stranger pick up their belongings after dropping them.** Now, that’s small, but there’s another observed phenomenon that I think makes this same point, and some of you may know it already: it’s called the Overview Effect. Astronauts can experience the overview effect when looking back at Earth from space. It’s this moment of overwhelming awe, of transcendence, where they feel a profound connection to everyone and everything on Earth, in a way they never had before. They experience a cognitive shift, a change in how they understand and experience the world, that, we might say, deepens their love and compassion for all the inhabitants of their home world.

There is a flip side to awe, though. It has to do with how the cognitive shift happens, how your mind accommodates the awesome thing you have experienced. And this makes sense, if we think about some examples. Upon seeing a T. Rex in real life, most of us would experience awe. But for most of us, it would be the terrifying kind of awe, the “run away in fear” kind of awe.

See, awe can be accommodated in two ways: it can open you up and draw you in, sparking curiosity and imagination and connection. Or it can make you afraid. You shut down to protect yourself. You don’t want to know more, you don’t want to hear about it, and you do everything you can to hide yourself from that awful thing. Your imagination begins to run wild, generating disaster after disaster. You might do anything you could to, say, protect yourself from the hordes of migrants at the border or the masses of protestors or even the billions in government waste. The “Billions and Billions” effect can be put to work in multiple contexts. Historical analysis shows us that authoritarian regimes grow on awe. This is why authoritarians elevate their leader to an awesome status and build huge concrete parade grounds. They must spark awe. They must make us feel profound fear.

So what does this mean for us, us tiny people here today? What do we do with all this awe?

We practice it.

We practice experiencing awe.

We ground ourselves in experiences of awe and wonder that draw us out instead of in. We seek out clear dark skies or vast oceans or deep forests. We make intentional connections with people whose words and actions and stories stir up the profound within us. We reflect on the wonder of a baby’s first breath and the awe of someone’s last. We practice awe that makes us curious, and kind, and compassionate, awe that demands we work for the preservation of all that is good in this world.

Because when we do that, when we practice that kind of awe, not only will we grow in love and in spirit, we will also grow in awareness. We will start to notice when others invoke the “Billions and Billions” effect in order to stir up fear and distrust. We will have compassion for those who experience that fear, always, of course, because we know now that it is a normal, maybe even hardwired response, to what they’re experiencing. A thunderstorm is awesome to behold. Most of us stay inside, though. But because we have grounded ourselves in a different experience, we can stand without fear. We can point to a different reality, a different future. And we can bring others with us into that future, into a world where every need is met and all are able to share in the beauty, joy, and abundance of this precious blue marble, suspended in space, the only home we have.

May we live to see that future, and may we give that world to our children.

May it be so.

*Judging by the laughter in the room, I was not even close.
**In retrospect, I realize that this phrasing sounds good, but is a little too loaded. Most of us experience awe and awe appears to be a distinct emotional and physical state that has predictable consequences, but it’s not like there’s an actual “awe nerve” or “awe button” that we can isolate through research and then use to activate the “awe reaction.” Here’s a lit review co-authored by one*** of the first published awe researchers. Here’s another good study with a great lit review that references the t-rex study, though I couldn’t find a publicly-accessible version of it.
***No, not the Righteous Mind guy, though he was the co-author on the seminal article on awe. And yeah, I think awe is great! Essential, even! But I also think that it’s not a panacea, because there is no such thing.)